That may be the case; I don’t think we have enough data yet to know.
Isn’t this plan kinda hard on doctors? Isn’t also kinda hard on, let’s say, cancer patients who would like to be able to go to a hospital that is not entirely filled with covid patients from top to bottom?
It is like population density is a foreign concept to lots of posters.
Check your local quilt shop for hand sanitizer. At least one of the companies that makes pressing aids and starch is now making hand sanitizer and the store I work in has plenty.
I love that, @suzyQ7. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that we don’t use any hand sanitizer. Just good old soap and water when we get home. So far, so good!
If you live in an area with no factories, no churches, no gyms, no bars, no restaurants, no food processing plants, no prisons, no call centers, no sports stadiums or arenas (that includes no large high school sports stadiums or arenas) and no low-income workers who live in crowded housing (that includes no permanent or itinerant farmworkers) then I guess you don’t have to worry about density.
I don’t think that describes many places in the US.
Also, auto parts stores had hand sanitizer at the beginning of all this. They may have more now.
A friend works for a nursing home corporation (I think they have 20 or so places that are NICE). She went on a local news show asking people to donate any masks and sanitizer they had and a nice auto parts guy hooked her up with 5000 masks.
My county is reasonably dense, and has most those categories listed in 4905. Out of 1.5 million people we have had about 1000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths, more than a third of which were in nursing homes. For my level of risk tolerance, these stats do not give me even the slightest bit of anxiety, although obviously we all regret any loss of life.
I remember seeing bottles of hand sanitizer priced for clearance at Autozone about March 6. Those were the days.
We had 2 larger bottles (one upstairs, one downstairs) and 2 small bottles (purse, car) before this started. Still have them. I use the one in the car sometimes, it’s about half gone now. The others just don’t get used, but we’ve gone through some Dial liquid soap.
I haven’t seen hand sanitizer in the stores here since March, but like another poster mentioned we only use it when we’re out and about away from a sink to wash our hands. Plus, I’ve been topping our hand sanitizer bottles up with some of the isopropyl alcohol from our work supply. We haven’t seen anything other than a few stray bottles of 70% isopropyl in the stores here but since we use the high-test stuff (close to 100%, don’t remember the exact %) at work as part of the manufacturing process, we have a couple of 5 gallon cans at work. So far, our industrial supplier hasn’t had shortage of the 5 gallon cans we order because they’re just selling to established customers.
I have noticed we’re going through significantly more hand soap both at home and work. So far that’s been easy to find.
Full disclosure, I am a health actuary. One of the hazards of my job is I can speak dispassionately about morbidity and mortality rates. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the tragedy occurring, or have the ability to discuss the facts on a more individual basis.
I disagree with your premise. Here is a hypothetical. Assume we had 1,000 85-year olds, and in January we separated them into healthy and less-healthy individuals, with 700 of them being labeled healthy. All were regularly tested, and by the end of May, we found that 100 had contracted COVID-19. Miraculously, 70 of them were from the healthy pool, and 30 were from the less-healthy pool. Ten of these individuals have died, with one from the healthy pool, and 9 from the less-healthy pool. Overall, the IFR would be 10%, but the IFR for the healthy pool would be 1.4%, while the IFR for the less-healthy pool would be 30.0%.
Having different mortality rates by cohort does not imply different rates of being infected.
Getting reliable data in the midst of a pandemic is challenging. It will be a while before we have answers, but questions I have seen discussed professionally include:
The gender differences observed vary significantly by state. Why is this, and what can we learn from it?
There are significant differences in total deaths based on race. If we correct by age, co-morbidity and type of employment, does the difference still exist? Are the racial differences strictly part of the larger socio-economic discussion this country needs to have, or is there something else occurring which could aid us in developing medical therapies?
Why does Switzerland, which started restricting gatherings on February 28th, have significantly different experience based on the predominant language spoken in the region?
The R0 is significantly impacted by the superspreader events, with a significant portion of infected passing it on to no one. Beyond social distancing, can we identify at risk behavior to reduce/eliminate super spreader events, which would have a significant impact on R0?
That’s us. I did buy some sanitizer in early March, but haven’t used it at all. (Not sure why I bought it in the first place since we only use it on airplanes to wipe the drop down table.)
We bought one bottle of GermX sanitizer from Costco in early March, when we were there buying toilet paper and sanitizing wipes. We have used less than a liter, including filling numerous old sanitizer bottles and giving a bottle of sanitizer from my relative who was still practicing medicine and seeing patients throughout the entire time (fewer during lockdown—urgent cases).
S saw sanitizer at Office Depot—$20 for a gallon, I believe. I didn’t want any as we aren’t using it very quickly—only a quick squirt when my ID/cc is returned to me to wipe off said card and my hands. Otherwise, I use soap and water.
I gave away many of the containers of sanitizing wipes—to relatives and @romanigypsyeyes as we aren’t using them very rapidly (very few cases in our state and 17 deaths total).
Don’t think so.
Most, along with hospitals, have been sucking air monetarily with the idea we quarantine healthy people to get through this. When the hospitals are actually filled, we can talk.
(And: figure in how many overdose, suicide, domestic violence, high-blood pressure stroke, etc. deaths have resulted from what we’ve done, when you’re calculating excess deaths to arrive at the true Wuhan toll.)
They’ll be arguing this for years, like I said.
I don’t know about the rest of this, but as someone married to a scientist, this is sooooo true!
There are so many unknowns - I don’t think anyone can truly know how many deaths are caused by closing the economy, vs people being afraid to go to the hospital, vs actually having Covid19. Even years from now when people have time to breathe again, I don’t think we’ll have kept the records that will give us the answers.
I am chuckling at your post! However, I think that the punctuation error is with the Business Insider article and not the actual San Francisco information release.
This is very true, but we will make estimates. The dirty little secret is that while we frequently see discussed the number of flu deaths in a year, this number is not known. We back into that number as well.
Wow, you gave to @romanigypsyeyes ?
That was awesome of you.
I have a 32 oz canister of sanitizer. It is scented, so that may be a negative. If someone is truly in need of it, let me know.
Yes, with the baby imminently coming (sooner than I thought), we blew through our cleaning products and were unable to find cleaning supplies ANYWHERE. I only have hand sanitizer, wipes, etc because of @HImom and I’ll be forever grateful.